John Wesley Gilbert

John Wesley Gilbert

John Wesley Gilbert (born July 6, 1863 in Hephzibah, Georgia; died November 18, 1923 in Augusta, Georgia) was a classicist, archaeologist, polyglot, translator, educator, Methodist missionary and one-time president of Miles College.

Gilbert was the son of Gabriel and Sarah Gilbert, who were enslaved to Henry Johnston in rural Georgia. He was born just days after the Battle of Gettysburg. He grew up in Augusta and attended public school during the half of the year when his farm labor was less needed. Because there was no public high school for Black students, he entered the Augusta Institute as a normal student. After the school relocated to Atlanta as the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, he was unable to maintain himself in the city, and returned to Hephzibah as a schoolteacher. In 1884 he enrolled in the newly-opened Paine College, an institution co-founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was mentored by college president George Williams Walker.

Gilbert was the first graduate of Paine college and was awarded financial assistance to continue his studies as one of the first ten Black students admitted to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 1886. He completed a bachelor's degree there in 1888 and returned to Georgia where he married fellow Paine alumna Osceola Pleasant.

As a standout student of classical languages, Brown professor Albert Harkness nominated Gilbert for a scholarship to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. In 1890 he became the first African American to study there. He won an award for excellence in Greek and participated in archaeological excavations at Eretria on Euboea. Gilbert assisted John Pickard in surveying the walls and producing the first map of the ancient city. The project generated some publicity over an erroneous claim that it contained the tomb of Aristotle.

After a year of study in Greece and another semester of lectures at the University of Berlin, Gilbert prepared a master's thesis on "The Demes of Attica" which was accepted by Brown toward completion of the first advanced degree awarded by that university to an African American.

In 1891 Gilbert joined the formerly all-white faculty at Paine College as a professor of Greek, French, German, Latin and Hebrew. His appointment was accompanied by protests and at least one professor's resignation. Gilbert earned a reputation as an exacting teacher with little patience for excuses. He continued his studies at the Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, and was ordained as a minister of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1897 he was elected to the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies).

In 1911 Gilbert joined Methodist bishop Walter Lambuth on a mission to the Belgian Congo, a colony of Belgium which was organized as successor to the so-called "Congo Free State", effectively a personal possession of Belgium's King Leopold II. The partners voyaged to the Congo via New York, London, Antwerpen, Kinshasha, and Luebo, a mission established earlier by William Henry Sheppard, his wife, Lucy Gantt Sheppard, and Samuel Lapsley, Alabamians who served with the American Presbyterian Congo Mission. Lambuth and Gilbert established a church and mission school (now the Université Patrice Émery-Lumumba de Wembo-Nyama) at a village named for its chief, Wembo-Nyama. The chief welcomed the influence of Christianity in his territory, which encompassed 26 towns and around 250,000 people. Wembo-Nyama did not join the church himself, though many of his wives did.

While in the Congo, Gilbert compiled a vocabulary and grammar of the Tetela language, and translated portions of the New Testament. After Lambuth and Gilbert's return to the United States, the Belgian government routinely denied permission for African-American missionaries to operate in the Congo, citing past "agitation" against atrocities committed there. Meanwhile the Southern Methodist Church was experiencing pushback from members who disapproved of giving Black missionaries the opportunity to represent their denomination in Africa.

In 1913 Gilbert was invited to Fairfield to succeed William Bell as president of the Christian Methodist Episcopal-affiliated Miles College. After one year, he returned to Paine College as its Dean of Theology. He was succeeded at Miles by George Payne.

As an educator, Gilbert served as a mentor and role model for another generation of African-Americans, including John Hope, the first Black president of Morehouse College. As a leader of the "interracial relations" movement, Gilbert promoted Christian love as the progress and development of "good will" interracial partnerships, such as the ones he had experienced as a student, professor, archaeologist and missionary. For such views he was sometimes labeled an accommodationist, or even a "flunkey" by leading Black periodicals, including The Horizon and The Appeal.

Gilbert was weakened by illness in 1921 and died in November 1923. He is buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Augusta. He was immediately eulogized for his views by leaders in the Southern movement for interracial cooperation, including ACIPCO founder John Eagan.

Honors for Gilbert followed years later. The city of Augusta named a low-income housing project near Paine College, now demolished, for him in 1941. In 1968 Paine College dedicated the Gilbert-Lambuth Memorial Chapel in memory of the missionary team. In 2020 the National Hellenic Museum in Chicago made Gilbert the first subject of its "Great Philhellenes" series, and in 2021 the American School of Classical Studies at Athens named the newly-renovated Student Center for him.

References

• Waldstein, Charles (1897) "Excavations by the School at Eretria in 1891" in Papers of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 6. Boston, Massachusetts: Ginn & Company, pp. 56–205
• "A Reverend Flunkey" (November 27 & December 4, 1909) The Appeal (St Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota)
• Gilbert, John Wesley (1912) "Report of African Mission"
• Colclough, Joseph C. (1925) The Spirit Of John Wesley Gilbert. Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press
• Calhoun, Eugene Clayton (1961) "Of Men who Ventured Much and Far: The Congo Quest of Dr. Gilbert and Bishop Lambuth." Atlanta, Georgia: Institute Press. pp. 16–17.
• Kasongo, Michael O. (1998) "A Spirit of Cooperation in Mission: Professor John Wesley Gilbert and Bishop Walter Russell Lambuth." Methodist History. Vol. 36, No. 4, p. 262
• Ronnick, Michele Valerie (Spring 2001) "John Wesley Gilbert ca. 1864–1923" The Classical Outlook, pp. 113-114.
• Jacobs, Sylvia M. (2002). "African Missions and the African-American Christian Churches", in Vaughn J. Walston & Robert J. Stevens, editors. African-American Experience in World Mission: a Call Beyond Community. Hattiesburg, Mississippi. William Carey Library. pp. 30–47
• Bielenberg, Aliosha (March 8, 2018) "Scholar, Activist, or Religious Figure? John Wesley Gilbert’s Reception and Legacy." paper delivered to " State of the Field 2018: Archaeology and Social Justice" conference at Brown University's Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
• Bielenberg, Aliosha & Amanda Brynn (May 9, 2019) "How to Write Black Disciplinary History on Its Own Terms: The Complex Life of John Wesley Gilbert." Eidolon
• Lee, John W. I. (2022) The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 9780197578995